01/09/2003
Miscues and Feathers
After a two-week vacation I’m back, but in a rather grumpy mood. I had been having problems with my desktop computer and celebrated New Year’s Eve by reinstalling Windows 95. Now my computer recognizes neither my CD-ROM drive nor my modem and I can no longer cut, copy or paste! New Year’s Day was spent configuring two laptops to take over the desktop chores. Then a letter from Lucent arrived advising that they were canceling the death benefit that was part of my retirement package from Bell Labs. My heirs will be the poorer. Next, an ice storm killed our power and heat for about 13 hours in the freezing weather. Worse, the power returned for a few hours during the outage but at a very low voltage. Fortunately, old Bortrum remembered that low voltage can damage motors and I had thrown all the circuit breakers for the furnace and other electrical equipment.
One bright spot during this period was the triumph of our New Jersey Jets over the Colts. Somewhat heartened, I composed my first Bortrum column of 2003 and gave it to my wife for her comments. A mistake - she proclaimed it to be the most boring column I’ve ever written! You can appreciate that I was not only a tad grumpy but also skeptical about prospects for 2003. Then came the sickening New Jersey Giants-San Francisco playoff game and the blown call by the officials robbing the Giants of another chance to kick a game-winning field goal. How bad can it get?
No doubt that game will live on in infamy for generations of Giants’ fans. With many to blame for the loss, will one player or official become the goat in a “canonical story” in the years to come? What is a canonical story and how can the search for a goat in a sporting event be related to science? To shed light on these questions, let’s turn to a book that I received for Christmas. The book is the late Stephen Jay Gould’s "I Have Landed", the tenth and final collection in a series of 300 consecutive essays he wrote for Natural History magazine.
One of the essays deals with canonical stories, defined by Gould as stories that have achieved the status of truth and the stamp of authority. However, these stories are biased by our human tendency to want developments to proceed along certain patterns and with attributes of valor. Or, lacking valor, with attributes of dishonor. My take on a canonical story is that we like to simplify our recollections of major events into memorable short stories that hide the complex circumstances surrounding those events.
Apropos of the Giants fiasco, Gould cites the canonical story that emerged from the famous (if you''re a Mets fan) or infamous (if you''re a Red Sox fan) incident of the 6th game of the 1986 World Series. Thirteen years later, an article in the New York Post of October 13, 1999 described the incident thusly: "…. Mookie Wilson''s grounder that rolled through the legs of Bill Buckner in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. That happened after the Red Sox were just one out away from winning the World Series." Similar accounts implying that Buckner was solely responsible for losing the Series have prevailed over the years.
To set the record straight, it was the ninth inning of the sixth game and the Mets had already tied the score! The Sox were not one out from winning the game. The Buckner error, while it gave the Mets the winning run, did not forego the possibility that the Red Sox could have won the Series in the final 7th game. Yet, the poor Mr. Buckner is given sole credit for continuing the curse of the Bambino, dating from when the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. This canonical story obscures the fact that Buckner was a valiant player who could hardly bend over and was usually removed in the late innings for defensive purposes. The Red Sox manager only kept him in so that his regulars could all savor the moment of winning the Series. Indeed, according to Gould, the Met’s scoreboard had already graciously flashed a congratulatory message to the Sox on their win prior to the Bruckner miscue! Who remembers how they lost the 7th game? I admit that I don’t, and I watched the game.
Gould, as we discussed in an earlier column, is best known for his role in proposing the "punctuated" theory of evolution. In the book, he associates our desire to simplify events in canonical stories with a tendency to view evolution in similar terms. Specifically, evolution is popularly viewed as a straight-line process with the valorous successive species replacing inferior dominant species, culminating with our Homo sapiens species as the ultimate product. Gould is grumpily adamant in arguing that we shouldn’t ascribe to our own species a favored place in evolution and decries the conclusion that we are superior to the dinosaurs. After all, the dinos ruled the earth for 130 million years, while we’ve only been around for half a million. And we mammals only lucked out thanks to that asteroid hitting the earth 65 million years ago. (I’ve read recently that there is some evidence that the dinosaurs may have owed their own success to a similar big impact.)
Gould stresses that evolution does not occur in a straight line but is the branching of bushes with many branches and twigs, some of which flourish while others die out. Take the case of birds, popularly cited as dinosaurs living among us today. Gould objects that, while the association of birds with dinosaurs is probably legitimate, birds are definitely not descended from those huge dinos that roamed the earth prior to extinction. Instead, birds evolved from one or more of the twigs or branches of the bush that harbored the dinosaur family. There were also small dinosaur cousins to the big guys. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine a bird the size of an ostrich evolving from a twig or branch of the smaller dino critters.
I was quite satisfied with Gould’s thesis. I still think it’s neat that birds are related to those dinos, if only by a branch or twig. And there certainly has been a slew of media and scientific journal coverage of findings of dino fossils with feathers in recent years. In a happier frame of mind, I kid you not, I had just finished reading the Gould essay on the birds when I picked up the February 2003 issue of Discover magazine. It contained an interview with Alan Feduccia, ornithologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina.
Feduccia does not believe that birds descended from dinosaurs, claiming the timeline is all wrong. In his view, the alleged ancestors of birds lived some 25 to 80 million years after the first known bird. That bird was Archaeopteryx, that big flying creature that we’ve all seen pictured or parodied many times. When it comes to the feathered fossils, Feduccia doesn’t think most are really feathers; to him they look more like skin folds. He also points out that in China, where most of the feathered dino-bird activity is centered, fossil forgeries are big business and fake fossils can bring in good money.
But what about cases where the feathers are clearly feathers? Feduccia says that we have to be careful to be sure that the feathers don’t belong to a flightless bird that has evolved from an earlier flying bird. I have a couple ties purchased in New Zealand; these ties have Kiwis on them. The Kiwi is an example of a flightless bird that apparently evolved from a flying creature when it found that it could get along fine in New Zealand, which then had no natural predators for the Kiwi.
Now I’m grumpier. I love the idea that birds are living dinosaurs and hate to see that link in doubt. I was pleased to read that Feduccia would change his mind if a true feathered dino fossil could be found that lived much earlier to fit his proper timeline. I’m hoping someone is digging furiously to find such a fossil.
Happy New Year!
Allen F. Bortrum
|